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How-To Geek

Windows 8 comes with a new Hybrid Boot feature, which decreases boot times. But from time to time you may find you need to do a classic, full shutdown. Here’s how to do just that without disabling Hybrid Boot.

What is Hybrid Boot?

Hybrid Boot is a new feature in Windows 8 that takes the Hibernate feature we all know and love and improves upon it to bring us faster boot times. In your PC you have multiple sessions, more specifically you have session 0 which is reserved for the kernel session and session 1 which is normally your user session. In traditional implementations of hibernation when you click hibernate your PC takes everything that it currently has in memory (RAM) and writes it to the hiberfil.sys file on your hard drive, this includes both session 0 and session 1 data.

With Hybrid Boot, instead of hibernating both sessions it only hibernates session 0, it then closes your user session. So now when you start your PC back up, it reads session 0 from hiberfil.sys and puts it back into memory, and starts a new user session for you. The result is dramatically faster boot times, with no effect on our user sessions.

How to Quickly Do a Full Shutdown

Right click on your Desktop and create a new shortcut.

When you are asked what you would like to create a shortcut to, type the following:

shutdown /s /t 0

Then give your shortcut a name.

Once you have created your shortcut, right click on it and head into its properties.

Now click on the Change Icon button.

I will just be using one of the default icons that comes with Windows, but feel free to choose your own.

“Windows 8 requires lots of fixes or tweaks” — That’s what I’ve noticed, too. So many how-to and tip articles on this site, and other sites, explaining how to make W8 work like W7 or XP. Doesn’t that just say it all? W8 is definitely not needed, nor a step forward. The public appetite for these tips prove it. Microsoft made a mistake. They need to go back to what people want, instead of trying to force something new on us just to appear innovative and fresh.

I’m inclined to disagree, at least for now. Every time we take a step forward there is always resistance; people like what they are familiar with. The Windows XP skin for Ubuntu isn’t evidence of Linux being terrible.

There are a lot of things about Windows 8 I’m not a fan of but I suspect will grow on me. The real design feature, to me, is the amalgamation of their app worlds with their existing software base. In my mind its a clever maneuver to jump start their market in their first attempt to join the worlds, which are becoming increasingly divergent. It lacks a lot of polish, but really, I can’t recall a product that had that polish at its onset.

@Paul: “So many how-to and tip articles on this site, and other sites, explaining how to make W8 work like W7 or XP. Doesn’t that just say it all? ”

It says something but I’m not at all sure it says what you and @mma173 (“Windows 8 requires lots of fixes or tweaks.”) are saying. Here’s what it says to me…

People are resistant to change. (And honestly, if what you have already works for you, there may be no good reason to change, or at least no compelling reason.) To assuage that resistance, people look for ways to make the new work more like the old. That doesn’t mean that these tweaks are required, and it doesn’t (in my opinion) say anything about the new system at all…other than people who are used to doing something in a certain way often prefer to keep doing it in the way they are used to.

Win8 is fine out of the box. A new user that doesn’t have ingrained habits from Win 9x/XP/Vista/7 may look at these tweaks that make Win 8 work more like these previous systems and wonder “Why bother?”

I’ve been using Windows back to WFWG3.11. That’s a long time. With each new iteration of Windows I’ve found myself with some resistance to change. What I’ve found over time however is that after using each new version for a while, the new way becomes what I’m used to, and going back to the old way often seems clunky if not a downright pain.

Anyway…these tweaks aren’t “required.” Win 8 works pretty well just as is. I’m personally still getting used to it and still spend almost all my time in Windows 7 or Vista (depending on which system I’m using.) I really don’t see myself moving full time to Win 8 until I get new hardware. For me, Win8 seems to be a really touch-centric system, and much like people who ran XP on old hardware often found XP wanting, I think many who run Win 8 on non-touch hardware may find themselves underwhelmed. Still..these tweaks aren’t required. They’re just ways of making the new work like the old again.

Thank you for yet another useful and practical article. I already knew about doing the shutdown using the CMD prompt, but placing the shortcut on the Start screen with a unique icon is an additional helpful idea. That makes the procedure even more convenient. Nice article!

dwn is spot on. Programmability is priceless. The ability to change the UI to suit your needs or wants. I find this fun. W8 is an intermediate program to bridge the gap between a big advance in how we are ultimately going to interact with or use our computing devices. Oh the possibilities. Haha, “Oh the places we’ll go”

It’s not really that much different from when any other version of windows was released. There were articles on 7 about how to revert the taskbar to look more like older versions of windows, for example. I definitely agree about the not forcing things on people, but Microsoft’s focus is on competing in the market. Unfortunately, that means doing whatever possible to get people to use their new software. So goes the business.

As for the article, is there any particular or noticeable benefit to NOT using hybrid boot? The second or third paragraph mentions ‘dramatically faster boot times’ — a good thing, one would assume.

Win 8 is not bad at all,I have it set up just like windows 7,from desktop you can barely tell the difference,and the metro interface is not so bad when you get used to it,and when did tweaking your desktop become a bad thing,whaa!!!!!!!

@Roman Berry, I’m an experience user just like you (I started with Windows 3.1) and I know that people do resist changes because I have seen them trying to revert changes back with every new version of the OS as you did. However, I don’t agree that Win 8 is good out of the box. To me, it’s a fine but unfinished product that I think will improve over the time–on Service Pack 2 maybe :)

One example out of few annoyances that screams UNFINISHED is when you open a picture, in the new Photo App by default, and try navigate through the folder and find it to be impossible?! How counter-intuitive is this? Do not ‘they’ really use their own OS? Sure such things can be fixed by assigning the file associations to the desktop application (Windows Picture Viewer). However, it should ‘simply work’ out of the box. I know that Windows users learned to deal with its shortcomings but not everyone is willing to help fix/improve the user experience.

I think if they’d managed to leap to a fully integrated cross platform OS in V1 (and in 2 years) i’d of been rather surprised. That said obviously ms have a much longer term plan for 9 and 10 that’ll refine these things. I’d not be surprised if they started doing annual updates to accelerate the transition rather than waiting for the 3 year cycle.

Sure, people are resistant to change. So why try to change them? Can’t the PC makers take a hint and leave well enough alone? Don’t fix what isn’t broken? If so many people are resistant, it’s for a reason. Often those reasons are valid, and forcing changes is not always a good idea. People get hung up on the concept that a PC from 2000 shouldn’t look or act like that anymore. Why not? Just make it more secure, but why change it? Aside from security fixes, most changes are just cosmetic BS that we can do without. Aero comes in, Aero gets taken out again. WTF? Stop changing!

I have an Asus P5KC motherboard and my windows8 simply won’t shutdown. no matter what I do while going through ever piece of advise I found online, it just won’t shutdown. the latest BIOS driver for this MB is from 2008 and I doubt if upgrading would change anything…

I have had a couple of occasions where there is a problem, and the hybrid shutdown saves the state that caused the problem. So simply restarting doesn’t fix the problem. This shortcut did work, and did clear everything and fix the problem.

(The first issue was on one of the previews, when a new beta video driver caused a problem. The other problem was with the RTM version, where the Store wouldn’t let me install any new apps. The helpful error was something like “Your purchase couldn’t be completed. Something happened and your purchase was not completed.”)

I’m not sure if anybody else has brought this to your attention, but this still doesn’t make your computer do a full shutdown. The kernel is still running and you need to add the /full into the shutdown code. I hate to say it, but windows just gets worse and worse.

GEEK TRIVIA

DID YOU KNOW?

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